The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (review)

Bureaucracies, particularly government bureaucracies, are intrinsically sclerotic, preferring stability at the expense of change. This statement sums up what has been orthodoxy in our change-besotted popular culture for at least the last quarter century. Associate professor of space studies Stephen Johnson joins the attack on this orthodoxy by arguing convincingly in The Secret of Apollo that the stability provided by bureaucracies has been absolutely necessary for change in the high-stakes, high-risk world of aerospace research and development (R&D) of the 1950s through the 1970s.

Johnson examines bureaucracies based on a variety of information practices and command hierarchies collectively known as systems management (SM). These techniques originated with the Air Force soon after World War II. At the dawn of the Cold War a renegade Air Force colonel named Bernard Schriever received a presidential sanction to circumvent the Air Force R&D establishment, centered on Wright Field near Cleveland, and to set up a dedicated project organization to develop the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile. Schriever believed that the Wright Field organization, arranged along disciplinary and functional lines, was too unfocused for a project as complex as an intercontinental ballistic missile. A dedicated project organization helped, but the Atlas missile's Achilles' tendon proved to be the interfaces between the missile's system components. When a series of spectacular failures during testing in 1956 and 1957 attracted public scrutiny, Schriever (now a brigadier general) resorted to centralizing several key engineering functions, including planning and scheduling, engineering design-change procedures, systems integration, and contractor oversight. Without the technical capacity to perform many of these tasks, Schriever assigned them to a new systems engineering firm, Ramo-Wooldridge, which later morphed into Thompson, Ramo, Wooldridge, Inc. (TRW), and Aerospace Corporation. The centralization of command and control, reified in Schriever's project-oriented bureaucracy, became the basis for SM or, as Schriever called it, configuration management.

Much as Thomas Hughes did in his recent Rescuing Prometheus (1998), Johnson rebuffs critics who charge that SM was primarily a political smoke screen. It forced new temporal and financial discipline on contractors and engineers, imposed practices that undermined functional organization and loyalties, and subjected to scrutiny all institutions and firms involved in the project. Schedule and cost slippages on large government-sponsored projects may have continued, but Johnson asserts that SM minimized their rate. In fact, Johnson persuasively argues that without the bureaucracy of SM, success on several large aerospace projects would have been unlikely.

Johnson then follows the career of the SM concept to other projects in the United States and Europe. He discovers a common pattern. SM was frequently a response to failure or outside pressure. Left to their own devices, most R&D communities favored functionalist organization, centered on the scientists and engineers, which SM subsumed in a hierarchical bureaucracy and a sea of protocols. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory resisted SM until the humiliating failure of its Ranger satellite project. The tight timelines and congressional budgetary scrutiny convinced the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to adopt SM on Project Apollo above squeals of protest from its veteran engineers. The failure of the European Space Vehicle Launcher Development Organization (ELDO), intended as Europe's declaration of technical independence from America, led to the chagrined importation of American SM methods by the European Space Research Organization (ESRO). Johnson is careful to detail how managers and engineers adapted SM in each new context.

Stylistically, Johnson is at his best with the Atlas story, possibly because the numerous personal accounts by participants allowed him to write with verve and humor. At the opposite end of the spectrum is his treatment of the European space projects, largely extracted from official reports and organizational analyses. Substantively, he labors to justify SM on a cost-benefit basis. The cost of information in SM-managed projects is high, he acknowledges...